XP wont install!

Hi All,

Great tutorial, thank you, it has enabled to get further than I have so far!

I have had a browse through this thread and cant find anything related to this problem so I am hoping someone can help please.

I have a Netbook which I have upgraded from XP Home to Win 7. & works great except I want to play Sacred/Diablo II on it and for the life of me I cant get Sacred to run under Win 7. So I am trying to setup a dual boot with XP Home on it.

I have partitioned my drive, and set the new partition to Primary (the Win 7 partition is Active) where I want to install Win XP.

I boot from the CD and it starts setup and then terminates in a blue screen of death completewith code and with the message Windows Setup has shutdown to protect your system from damage. The system then has to be hard reset to restart it.

I have a genuine copy of XP Home Upgrade and a genuine copy of Win 7 upgrade and I have tried the various fixes on the Net for running Sacred/Diablo II (fully patched, run in 256 colours, admin & XP mode etc) so I am now going down the dual boot path but I cant even get this to work.

Can someone please help as all I really love my hack n slash games and the nlow spec Netbook seemed an ideal machine for them.

PS I have an Acer Aspire Netbook running a 1.6 Atom and 1gb RAM.

I cannot see what could cause this, though the partitioning will need to be reformatted using XP's tool because Win7's NTFS is different. That shouldn't bluescreen XP installer load (but it might).

Try running it from the Win7 desktop to see what happens.

See if you can snap a pic of that bluescreen so we can trace the errors.

Also, have you still got the windows.old folder from your XP>win7 upgrade, because you can roll it back to XP using that.

If so, then I'd make make an image of your Win7 using W7 backup imaging, Acronis or free Macrium, save it externally, then later reimage it to a second drive/partition after rolling back XP on the first partition. A simple W7 repair install will sort out the boot.

Darkelf,

There's a tutorial on how to install XP after you've installed Windows 7.

Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

I haven't tried it, but if you haven't already read it, you should check it out.

Which version of Win7 are you runnning?

If its Pro or Ultim8... look into XP Mode... if it's not DL and install Microsoft Virtual PC and then install XP on the VM.

You may also want to check into the Boot to VHD function in Win7

Another thing - I've read another XP/7 tutorial, which recommends NOT formatting from within Windows 7. I'm going to guess you formatted the partition while using the 7 disk management?

gregrocker said:

NTFS partition table is diff in XP.

Try to download and burn Partition Wizard or other legacy-friendly manager and reformat the partition using it, then try to boot XP installer again.

Or, boot back into 7, fire up the disk management utility, delete the XP partition, then reassign a drive letter but do not format it. That should also work.